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When I unboxed my MicroServer several weeks ago, I was surprised to find an unexpected second box inside. The surprise turns out to be an HP PS1810 8-port gigabit switch to compliment my Proliant MicroServer. The PS1810-8G is specifically manufactured to sit perfectly on top of the Proliant MicroServer Gen8. Its the epitome of “made for […]

SolarWinds announced today that its subscription-based DNSstuff will now be offered as a free service to customers. The DNSstuff site offers customers with many tools to quickly troubleshoot and solve DNS issues on the internet. Some of the tools are fairly straight forward – like webified versions of Whois and Dig, but others provide more insight […]

On Wednesday, SolarWinds announced the VOIP and Network Quality Manager, formerly known as SolarWinds IP SLA Manage, aimed directly at quality control of Cisco IP telephony systems today with support for additional vendors in the future. But beyond the core phone system software, the monitoring suite watches the entire VOIP environment holistically, including the transport, servers […]

Converging networks and condensing server footprints have been major trends in computing for the last several years. Examples of this range from protocols like Fiber Channel of Ethernet (FCoE) to blade centers to interconnect technologies like HP’s Virtual Connect. In the blade world, shared interconnects have changed how connectivity is defined to a blade chassis […]

This week, we shine the spotlight on network convergence and management in the FlexNetwork portfolio, specifically the HP Virtual Connect FlexFabric modules and the Intelligent Management Control (IMC) software. Networking is generally not my forte, so some of this is a stretch for me, but I use and understand Virtual Connect. FlexFabric is an implementation […]

All IT solutions will experience problems at some point in their life. Supporting IT solutions is difficult, time-consuming and costly, but also a fact of life – a fact as a systems administrator I am thankful for. It means, I have a job. Problem solving skills are absolutely necessary, but all administrators need the expert […]

Like many shops, we have finally attained buy-in from all our stakeholders for virtualization. As a result, we’ve pushed more and more into our infrastructure. And while VMware is the most datacenter ready solution for virtualization, it is not without its shortcomings — monitoring and visibility into the infrastructure being one of the biggest. While we were […]

Among the new technologies introduced with ESX4, I’m particuarly inpressed with the vNetwork Distributed Switch. We have chosen to slowly introduce the dvSwitches into our environment and transition VM’s over to these switches. The distributed switch allows us some new capabilities such as centralized management, individual port assignments, retained state after vMotions, port statistics and […]

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